3 Comments to “New On-​​Line Contest”

The World has changed so much old Friend that all Rules of edu­ca­tion went out the win­dow. Out our way matric­u­la­tion cer­tifi­cates are pretty much dished out by age 19; a large per­cent­age of bear­ers can’t even spell, leave alone write, their own names by then.

Every year at cur­rent rate about 500 thou­sand of them go out into the World; one third going straight to the unem­ploy­ment lines [to be joined pretty soon after by the rest of half of them]. One third, so far but now com­ing down, goes into hi-​​tech jobs where they don’t ever have to write any­thing. A good por­tion even­tu­ally calls them­selves attor­neys, lawyers, bar­ris­ters or advo­cates and joins the polit­i­cal groups becom­ing ”com­mu­nity activists” what­ever in hell that is sup­posed to mean or to describe.

Noth­ing is unbreak­able (as the U.S. proved in the skies over Hiroshima when not a few peo­ple were seri­ously dis­com­moded by the break­ing of that unbreak­able, small­est unit of mat­ter, the atom.

Unfor­tu­nately, where mat­ters of cul­ture are con­cerned, the good things are both more eas­ily bro­ken and harder to get back than the bad ones. When the Greco-​​Roman notion of peo­ple hav­ing rights before their rulers, and even choos­ing those rulers, was flushed out the scup­per of the ship of state it took twelve hun­dred years to retrieve even a glim­mer of that idea in the Magna Carta and another 500 years to gain explicit expres­sion in the Amer­i­can Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence.

Yup, it’s a long time but I have been mak­ing a deci­sion and now that you said what you did I think it is made up for me.

I may live another 17 months [quite prob­a­ble]; another 17 years [heck no, that will get to 90 and that is too old] so I have been com­ing to the con­clu­sion for what I can change about the World it ain’t worth shit try­ing for another 17 hours.